[Ambassadors] The GNU & Linux Community advancement in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México

[Renich Bon Ciric]

Well, first of all, I need to explain a bit of my perception of the
"Community" in Guadalajara.

IMHO, the community in Guadalajara is not as collaborative, united and
well established as others. We need to have points of reunion and
events.

One of these points of reunion is LinuxCabal
(http://www.linuxcabal.org/) and, in their name (not Fedora's so far),
LinuxCabal has a warehouse with a LAN and WIFI... and some very old
PCs; which, in a very slow way, funciton... hehe

I've been developing some infrastructure project so we can aspire to
get, from some companies, government, organizations or schools, a bit
of equipment.

So far, I've taken this project to HP and CANIETI (National Chamber of
Electronics, Telecommunications and IT Industries), of which most big
companies, if not all, are members.

I was very surprised, in HP, when the person that I made first contact
with (Sagrario Robles) asked me if "Lynucs" was a program developed by
LinuxCabal and what "open source" is. Also, when I went to CANIETI,
the President; from IBM, was very exited about OpenOffice... but he
had, whatsoever, no experience with a GNU & Linux distro.

I couldn't believe my ears... I got really confused... I thought these
guys would go like "hey, Linux!! Yeah, great!! We were waiting for
ya!"

All of them agreed to participate in many ways. HP offered 300
developers "at our service" and said that they would do marketing
inside HP and that they would study the possibility of donating the
equipment (some servers, 10 workstations and other A/V stuff).

CANIETI asked us to migrate their 12 workstation office to GNU & Linux
and offered a ton of things:
- Really cool infrastructure for events (2 or 3 400 people capacity
venues with A/V equipment and all)
- The possibility to promote and represent the Community in government
chairs, schools, companies, etc
- The possibility to promote GNU & Linux in important; bi-annual,
company owner meetings
- Help with projects; to help us develop them and get them to the
right institutions/people/government departments, etc
- Access to CANIETI's Software Centre (500 developers there)

So, they just asked us to become legally established (NGO); which
costs ~$800 usd here. We're trying to get the money... we've got ~$100
so far.

I'm telling you all this because I love Fedora and the community
around it. I'm helping out LinuxCabal because there's a need for some
generic group here; in which I represent Fedora.

I'm open to ideas, collaboration and stuff you wanna tell me. I'm a
total noob here, so, I'd love suggestions and stuff people could
collaborate. I'm sure it's similar in other parts of the world but...
regarding legal stuff and ways of thinking, every country is unique.

-- 
It's hard to be free... but I love to struggle!
Renich Bon Ciric

http://www.woralelandia.com/
http://www.introbella.com/